Yoshinobu Hakutani

The Syntax of Modal Constructions in English

Abstract A re-analysis and classification of English modals are proposed. Most of the candidates for inclusion in the modal category are eliminated since they are independently generated as verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Those included are further classified into the ‘pure’ (M) and the ‘quasi’ (Q) by their ability to combine internally in the auxiliary. On syntactic grounds, then, Chomskys re-writing rule is revised as. Aux → Tense(M)(Q) n ( have + en )( Q ) n ( be + ing ) ( Q ) n . Based on this segmentation, both modals and quasi-modals are examined regarding their selectional characteristics as well as their relationships to certain transformation. The paper concludes that despite tenuous evidence surrounding their semantics, the syntax of English modal constructions can be described by a single rule.

Young Dreiser : a critical study

This critical analysis of Theodore Dreisers early career challenges the conventional view of Dreiser as a novelist who depicted a world in which human creatures are hopelessly entangled in a meaningless and ferocious struggle for existence. Instead, it shows that he learned to be a sensitive but detached observer who could accept life as it is and appreciate its fact and drama.

The Western and Eastern Thoughts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Among the well-known twentieth-century African American novels, Invisible Man (1952) has distinguished itself as unique racial discourse. As a novel of racial prejudice, Richard Wright’s Native Son had succeeded in awakening the conscience of the nation in a way that its predecessors had failed to do. Toni Morrison’s celebrated novel Beloved (1987) is perhaps one of the most poignant recreations of the legacy of slavery. For the expression of an African American woman’s love and suffering, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) excels in its use of a vernacular as does Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told by an innocent, uneducated youth. Such novelists as Wright, Morrison, and Walker have succeeded in recording the ineffable agonies and rages of racial victims only because their works are solidly based on fact and history. None of these novels, however, concerns the mindset of an individual more subtly than does Invisible Man. And this novel, unlike other African American novels, features the complexity of the protagonist’s mind thoroughly foregrounded with a cross-cultural heritage. Invisible Man, then, represents the confluence and hybridity of Western and Eastern thoughts.

James Emanuel’s Jazz Haiku

While haiku is a traditional Japanese poetic form, jazz has its origin in African American music. Despite technical differences in composition, haiku and jazz have been known for the powerful expressions of human sentiments by celebrated artists in both genres. Jazz from the Haiku King (1999) is the latest collection of Emanuel’s work, in which a contemporary African American poet has presented a series of literary experiments he calls “jazz haiku.”1 As jazz has crossed cultural boundaries the world over in modern times, Emanuel’s intention is to translate the musical expressions of African American life, its pain and joy, into the 5-7-5 syllabic measures of haiku. In so doing, he has also attempted to expand the imagery of the traditional haiku beyond its single impression by including narrative and rhyme.

Cross-Cultural Poetics: Sonia Sanchez’s Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums

Some accomplished poets produced their work in isolation. Emily Dickinson is one of the world’s best-known and widely admired poets, though at the time of her death in 1886, only eight of her more than seventeen hundred poems had been published. Richard Wright, as noted earlier, wrote in exile more than four thousand haiku in his last year and half. Yet only twenty-four of them had posthumously appeared in print before the publication of Haiku: This Other World (1998), a collection of 817 haiku Wright himself had selected.

Jack Kerouac’s Haiku and Beat Poetics

Jack Kerouac (1922–69), whose first novel, On the Road (1957), captured a huge audience, played a central role in the literary movement he named the Beat Generation. His second novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), gave an intimate biographical account of himself in search of the truth in life. In San Francisco he met Gary Snyder (1930—) and the two Dharma bums explored the thoughts and practices of Buddhism. As Snyder left for Japan to study at a Zen monastery, Kerouac reached an apogee on a desolate mountaintop in the Sierras.

Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African “Primal Outlook upon Life”

Richard Wright is acclaimed for his powerful prose in Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), books that he wrote early in his career. But later in his life he became interested in poetry, especially the haiku. In the 1950s he liked to work in the garden on his Normandy farm, an activity that supplied many themes for his haiku (Fabre, Unfinished Quest 447). Of Wright’s other experiences in this period, his travels to the newly independent Ghana in West Africa are also reflected in his haiku. The African philosophy of life Wright witnessed among the Ashanti, the “primal outlook upon life,” as he called it, served as an inspiration for his poetic sensibility (Black Power 266)